


Incident on Old Orchard Road

by SheliakBob



Category: Jungle Captive (1945)
Genre: Ape Woman, Saber-Toothed Rabbit, Universal Horror Films
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 08:41:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8526412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SheliakBob/pseuds/SheliakBob
Summary: Takes place during the end of the third and final film of the Paula the Ape Woman series from Universal. A pair of ambulance drivers arrive at the Stendahl House to cart away the remains of the Ape Woman. Who may not be as dead as everyone believes. Contains a shout-out to a classic Aurora Monster Scenes model kit, with a loose tie-in to the film itself.





	

INCIDENT ON OLD ORCHARD ROAD

“How can you tell we’re still on the road?”  
There was nothing to be seen but billows of dust in the ambulance’s headlights.  
“Because we ain’t hit a tree yet.” Grumbled Jim, foot grinding the pedal to the floor, fingers white-knuckling the steering wheel as they careened down the rural dirt road.  
Theirs was the last in a line of police cruisers and at least two other ambulances tearing their way down a God-forsaken stretch of country road in the middle of the night.  
“You better not hit a tree!” Bill shouted through gritted teeth. Bill was a big man with a round face and heavy cheeks that quivered as the ambulance rumbled over the rough road. His normally sleepy looking eyes were wide open at the moment.  
“This is a brand new ride and we will catch unholy Hell if we lose another meatwagon!”  
“You don’t have to remind me.”  
Jim took a deep breath, savoring the fresh leather new car smell of the ambulance. It was a Siebert stretch Ford job, with an engine that ran smooth no matter how hard he pressed her. It ain’t a Cadillac, he thought to himself, but it was a damn-sight better than the rattling, cantankerous workhorse it replaced. That beast shook like a carnival ride going over paved highway and always stank of Bill’s cigarettes, no matter how often it was aired out. The back stank worse, but you had to expect that after carting a hundred or more stiffs on their last joyrides. There was a certain, inevitable, amount of leakage involved in said transportation.   
The previous vehicle was at the bottom of a steep canyon about four miles back, a notorious local dumping ground for stolen vehicles known as “Cadillac Canyon.” It had been unceremoniously run off the cliff after being stolen right from under Jim and Bill. The thought still made Jim grit his teeth and squirm. The two of them had been chewed out by their boss and soundly mocked by their coworkers for their misfortune.  
If Jim squinted, he could just make out the cherry-red glow of the taillights on the car ahead of them, and to tell the truth, if he lost sight of that beacon, they probably would wind up running off the road. Jim couldn’t see a damn thing through the dust-glare. Old Orchard Road was such a narrow lane that trees practically roofed it in. Branches swatted at them from out of the dark on both sides.  
“Geez, Jim. Take it easy!” Bill yelled when they bounced in and out of a hole in the road, tires spitting pebbles out in all directions.  
Barreling along as they were, Jim almost overshot the house they were speeding to. It was an old, desolate little two-story tucked in under a copse of apple trees. The yard in front of it was mashed with police cars, pulled in at all kinds of crazy angles. The headlights of the other two ambulances ahead of them filled the road with so much white glare that he couldn’t even see the open gate he nearly plowed into. Yanking the wheel around in a frantic hand-over-hand while shifting gears, Jim made it look like he had deliberately overshot the turn-off by a bit to allow him to back the ambulance into a grassy slot between two black cop sedans. Smooth as silk!  
“You damn near missed the house, and don’t try to tell me that you didn’t.” Bill accused.  
Damn.  
Well, Jim thought he made the maneuver look smooth and deliberate. Bill just knew him too well.  
“We made it, didn’t we?” Jim said, smiling sweetly. “Let’s move it or we’ll miss the party and have to go home empty-handed.”  
Bill laughed and jumped out of the seat, all business now that they’d reached their call. Together they rolled out The Rack and headed in.  
Bill and Jim had to weave their way through a pack of cops, some in uniform but most plain clothes types. Everyone had a notebook and everyone was scribbling furiously in them. Jim figured about half of what was getting written down actually had anything to do with the case. Most of the cops looked bored.   
The snap-pop-sizzle of crime scene photographs being taken came from inside the house. Flashes lighted up the dusty windows like some kind of lightning storm prowling around inside the house, moving from room to room. The air smelled of flash-powder, gun smoke, and spilled blood. This was going to be a bad one, Jim thought.  
There was a young couple sitting on the couch, breathlessly telling their story to Harrigan, the lead detective on the case. The guy looked a bit beat up, but basically okay. The girl was pale as a sheet. Lots of blood loss, recently. Jim could tell. But she already had a blanket around her shoulders and Ricky, that grinning ghoul from Mercy Cross, was already fussing over her.  
Bill and Jim continued on into some kind of home operating room set up in the back of the house. They steered The Rack smoothly around furniture and milling cops, years of practice making the job look simple.  
“Holy Hannah!” Bill whispered as they edged past knob-studded electrical devices and trays full of gleaming surgical tools. “What was going on here?”  
Jim shrugged.  
Yeah. This was going to be a bad one.  
“Ow!” Bill yelped suddenly.   
He’d walked right into some kind of portable cage for lab animals, lying on its side on the floor. The cage was big enough to hold a good-sized dog and was made of metal, though the label on it read, “Experimental Subject One--Rabbit.” The front cage door was bent out as if it had exploded from within. The jagged bars bit into his leg hard enough to leave little red spots soaking through his white trouser leg.  
“Sonuva…” Bill started to sputter.  
That’s when Jim saw the first dead body. His face, already thin, leathery, and a little sallow turned pale.  
“Get a load of that!” He hissed at Bill, giving him a quick elbow to get his attention.  
The body on the floor was huge. Thick gnarled limbs, a great barrel chest, definitely a big man. It was the face, though, that made them both gasp. It was like looking at a caveman. It had a huge bony brow, broad nose, thick lips, and a jaw that was more gorilla’s than man’s. Tight, dark curled hair covered the top of the head. The eyes were both open and glassy, seeming both sorrowful and blissful at the same time, the way some dead eyes do, as if the process of dying had been sad but strangely, surprisingly, happy at the end. The big man had been shot several times. There was a thick pool of blood spread out across the floor around him.  
“Don’t tell me we got to carry that brute!” Bill said to the nearest cop. “He must weigh three hundred pounds, at least.”  
“No such luck.” The cop replied. “You guys got here last, so you get her instead.”  
He gestured with his thumb toward another body crumpled on the floor between two wheeled operating tables.  
At first, Jim couldn’t tell if the body was a man or a woman. It was dressed in a blood-soaked white hospital gown, definitely dress-like, snuggly covering curved hips and breasts that certainly looked female. But the head…there was a full head of long, coarse black hair, but it looked like the face was covered with a thick, bushy beard. The skin was dark, actually black, not brown. The teeth, which were wide and flat except for fang-like incisors, were bared in a last painful grimace. The nose was long, snout-like but ended in broad prognathous nostrils. Like an ape’s.  
“Oh no.” Muttered Bill.  
“Yeah.” The cop said with a vicious grin. “Meet what’s left of Paula Dupree, the Ape Woman! She’s all yours, boys! God help you, you sorry bastards.”  
“Fine.” Muttered Bill. “Let’s get it on The Rack.”  
They lowered the gurney as far down as it would go on its collapsible supports. Bill grabbed the Ape Woman’s shoulders while Jim grabbed her legs at the knees.  
“Okay. One…Two…Lift!”  
The two men strained to lift the body and found that they could barely get it a couple of inches off the floor before dropping it.  
“Holy Cow!” Exclaimed Bill.  
“What the Hell?” Echoed Jim.  
“Remember,” Said the grinning cop, who had watched their efforts with undisguised amusement, “That’s about five hundred pounds of gorilla squeezed into that little lady.”  
After some colorful cussing, and refusing an offer to get a couple of uniforms to assist them, Bill and Jim rolled the Ape Woman’s corpse next to the gurney, dragged an arm and a leg over the lowered rail, then put their shoulders to it and shoved the heavy carcass over onto the stretcher. With a few cranks they had her up to about waist level and buckled in.  
“Damn, she stinks like wet dog and sour gym socks.” Jim complained.  
“That’s n way to talk about our lady passenger, Jimbo.”   
Bill patted a cold, hairy hand.  
“Don’t you listen to him, Dollface. You’re a sweet little petunia compared to some of the stiffs we’ve lugged.”  
Jim mad a face and set to pushing the gurney back out to the ambulance. The sooner they were out of here, the better. The Ape Woman’s eyes were half open and the way they seemed to be looking at him creeped Jim out.   
They had to wait for the other ambulance teams to carry out their loads. The first one out was an older man in a white lab coat. His eyes and tongue were popped out and his neck was a flaccid purple skin-tube filled with crushed bones. Bill was happy when the team taking him out pulled the sheet back up over that face.  
“That was Dr. Stendahl.” Offered their friend with the notebook. “This was his house and all this, “ he gestured toward the improvised operating room, “was his little hobby.”  
“What did he need with all this equipment? What was he trying to do?’  
“Harrigan says the Doc was trying to bring the dead back to life with an electrical heart-needle of some sort.”  
“Oh. One of those.” Muttered Jim.  
“Yeah. But apparently it worked. The couple out front were lab assistants of his, from his legitimate research lab downtown. They say they saw him bring a rabbit back to life. Guess the Ape Woman was his next project. You can see how that turned out.”

A short while later, the boys had their passenger strapped in and secured in the back of the ambulance and were cruising back down the dirt road, at a considerably more sedate pace than their trip out. The body in the back was already dead and getting cold. There was no need to hurry.  
Dust still lingered along the road from the two ambulances that proceeded them, but now it had settled back toward the ground, hanging like a low fog over the rutted lane instead of a swirling cloud. There was barely any moon out and this far from the city nights were pitch black. Tree trunks stood to either side of the road, gray in the white wash of the headlights. Overhead black masses of leaves swayed and rustled, stirred up by the breeze left by the vehicles ahead of them.  
“Kind of creepy out here.”  
“No kidding.”  
“It’s so dark, and empty.”  
“It’s night time. In the country. What do you expect?”  
Bill shrugged. He shifted around in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position.  
“I dunno. It just kind of gets to me, you know?”  
“Yeah.”  
Jim wanted out of here as much as his partner did.   
That’s when they heard a groan from the back of the ambulance.  
Bill’s face went white. He turned in his seat and looked through the sliding glass window in the back of the cab. The lights weren’t on in the back, so all he could see was a lumpy black shape, covered with a sheet, lying on the stretcher.   
“What are you, a five year old?” asked Jim with a harsh little laugh. “Just gas leaking out of the stiff. It happens all the time.”  
There was another groan, deeper than the first.  
“Let me loose. I don’t like this.”  
The voice was a woman’s, but flat and wooden, almost completely devoid of inflection.  
“That wasn’t just gas. Was it, Jim.” Bill whispered.  
“Nope.”  
The urge to hit the brakes and stop the ambulance warred with an equally strong urge to stamp on the gas. For the moment, the urge to get somewhere with bright lights and other people won out. Jim stepped on the gas. The ambulance began to rock and bounce as it sped along the dirt road.  
“I don’t like this.” Repeated the oddly flat voice.  
Bill and Jim looked at each other and, as if on cue, screamed at the top of their lungs.  
“I said LET ME LOOSE!” The woman’s voice became a harsh, guttural bellow. There were snarls. The ambulance began to rock harder. Restraints creaked, the metal rails on The Rack made tortured squeaks.  
Bill flipped a switch that turned on the dome lights in the back. Instead of the hairy monster they had lugged on to the ambulance, a beautiful woman lie on the stretcher, with creamy pale skin, black hair cut in curly bangs. For a moment Bill relaxed. She was actually quite lovely.  
Then the beautiful face contorted into a bestial snarl that had nothing human in it as the creature screamed with rage.  
At that moment something hopped into the road ahead of the ambulance. It looked like a rabbit, but it was big as a dog. Its huge eyes flared red in the headlights. Instead of fleeing or freezing in fear, the animal dropped into a crouch, ready to spring towards the oncoming vehicle. Its mouth was open, baring two great saber-fangs. Foaming spittle drooled over its lips.  
“Ahhhh!”   
Jim screamed and instinctively cranked the steering wheel. The ambulance lurched, slewing sideways and skidding over loose dirt and grass. With an enormous bang it slammed against a tree trunk and tipped toward the right side. Broken glass showered the passengers, who were tossed violently about.  
The Thing in the back of the ambulance howled with rage and fear.  
After a moment of dazed confusion, Bill shoved open his door and started to step out. His foot dangled in thin air, not coming in contact with any ground. Confused, he leaned over and looked out the open door. The ambulance rocked slightly. The front of the ambulance was fetched up against a heavy oak, which had stopped the vehicle’s slide. The passenger side leaned precariously over a steep embankment, hanging above the cliff edge of a deep canyon. Yawning blackness opened beneath Bill’s dangling foot. He couldn’t see the ground below.  
With elaborate caution he slowly pulled his leg back inside the cab and began to inch slowly toward the driver’s side.  
“Jim. Jim. Jim. We gotta get moving, Jim.” He whispered hoarsely.  
Jim was slumped over the wheel, blood covered his forehead and eyes. Bill had a sick moment of dread, but, hearing his name, Jim stirred and started to sit up. The blood all came from a shallow scalp wound, looking much worse than it was.  
Suddenly the Thing in the back began thrashing again. The whole ambulance shook. It began to slide slowly to the right.  
“Lady, you stop that right now or you are going to be in a helluva lot of trouble.” Bill shouted with angry panic. To his surprise, the thrashing stopped.  
“I don’t like this.” Said the woman’s voice, still flat and toneless, but with a hint of petulance, like a scolded child’s.  
“Neither do I. Neither do I.” Bill sighed. “Jim, we got to get moving. Open your door and slide out.”  
“ ‘Kay.” Jim mumbled.  
His door creaked open and he half tumbled out on to the grass. Bill began to scooch for his life.  
“Let me LOOSE! LET ME LOOSE!” Bellowed the Thing in the back again. The ambulance began a steady slide over the side of the cliff. Bill caught a glimpse of a hairy shape flailing about in the back. Straps snapped and flew loose. Glittering black eyes stared into his just for an instant. They were an animal’s eyes and they were full of rage.  
Bill dove desperately through the driver’s side door. His fingers hit grassy soil and dug in hard. He could feel the ambulance slide out from under his legs as it toppled over. In a second it was gone.  
There were several loud crashes, a metallic screech, the whompf of the fuel tank igniting, and the inhuman howls of something trapped in the wreck dwindling as the ambulance bounced down into the canyon.  
As Bill lie on the ground, weeping with relief, he could hear Jim cussing.  
“Lost another meatwagon. It’s our jobs for sure.”


End file.
